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For what its worth, I can run KDE 4.6 on an old laptop with a 32-bit Turion single core processor, 512MB of system memory, a 4200RPM (!!!) 60GB IDE hard drive, and a graphics chip so old it benches as slightly behind the desktop graphics card I had in 1999. I've never had to kill the desktop (!!!) or anything of the sort. This is with the slower open source driver (my integrated graphics are too old for proprietary driver support) and with the standard graphics effects enabled along with my beloved wobbly windows. :-) Maybe I'm just spoiled by OpenSUSE, I don't know....

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I really want to like KDE, it looks better than Gnome, the KDE application suite is better than Gnome, QT is better than GTK and the overall desktop experience is more polished.

However, to sit there and tell me that all 5 of my PCs that ran KDE poorly are "isolated incidents" is laughable. Even when it runs OK, it certainly doesn't run well. I actually ran Kubuntu for a while once, bit that was on a Pentium M machine with a IGP. That machine had slow graphics in general, but it was by far my best KDE experience.

If KDE took an objective look at themselves and made a real attempt to fix it's problems, then KDE might become the dominant DE, rather than an "alternative desktop choice".

Run the premiere KDE-based distro, OpenSUSE 11.4. It should run fine out of the box. If it doesn't, please let us know what specific problems you encountered.

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1. Booted up, it's a bit jittery with white flashes, I have no desktop effects, and that little piano riff played waaaaaay too late. (...)I receive notification that basically every effect can't be turned on. (...) now I get a soft-crash warning and some occasional screen corruption. (...) I immediately lose my entire screen. I CTRL+ALT+SYSREQ+K it, which pops up some weird error. I hit enter a couple times, and now I'm at a terminal. startx gives an error saying X is already running.

Aaaahhhhhh the joys of KDE. It's so easy to break. As someone above said, I also had it running on two machines and it wasn't all roses. Also, the slowest machine (Atom N270 1,6GHz + GMA950) had about the same desktop performance and responsiveness as the faster machine (Athlon X4 2,8GHz + Radeon HD4200) which is at least strange.

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Aaaahhhhhh the joys of KDE. It's so easy to break. As someone above said, I also had it running on two machines and it wasn't all roses. Also, the slowest machine (Atom N270 1,6GHz + GMA950) had about the same desktop performance and responsiveness as the faster machine (Athlon X4 2,8GHz + Radeon HD4200) which is at least strange.

Why is it strange?
KDE can be fully accelerated, like Gnome Shell, and I noticed basically the same thing as you (running an old jhbuild of Gnome Shell on an old netbook and the same on a quad core intel with discrete graphics). The issues that are occurring seem related to specific hardware/software combinations. Basically both of us are running pretty old hardware which is pretty well supported (I'm assuming you're using the OSS drivers for the Radeon) and one netbook is much like another.
Am I wrong about this?

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Run the premiere KDE-based distro, OpenSUSE 11.4. It should run fine out of the box. If it doesn't, please let us know what specific problems you encountered.

Fair enough. I tried OpenSUSE with KDE a couple years ago, back when Ubuntu 9.04 was a no-go on the PC I had at the time. I was able to run OpenSUSE, but I was horribly unimpressed with it, and actually wound up installing an older Ubuntu release.

OpenSUSE 11.4's kernel doesn't have FOSS Radeon support for Llano, so that rules out my Llano desktop and laptop for any meaningful testing. Being that my PhenomII/HD4650 system isn't hooked up right now, I opted to test my wife's Athlon II/HD4200 laptop.

The laptop is still running an old Ubuntu 10.04 installation with the initial FOSS 3d support, and runs Compiz admirably, with every effect enabled, wobbly windows, exploding windows, paper-airplane windows, desktop cylinder, etc... All running smoothly on a 2 y/o IGP and a 2 y/o operating system.

1. Booted up OpenSUSE, everything seems to be going OK.
2. I open a few random applications, and move around to different virtual desktops. It seems pretty smooth, much better than previous KDE experiences.
3. I attempt to go all-out and turn on more desktop effects. I get a message saying that everything I tried to turn on can't be turned on, and also numerous effects that were already supposed to be on by default can't be turned on.

All in all, it was a huge improvement in speed, and although it could barely do any desktop effects, it didn't actually crash or show any screen corruption during the brief time I tested it.

However, the fact that most of the desktop effects can't be turned on doesn't instill confidence, nor does it make me want to recommend it for people with AMD hardware.

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OK, so now we're moving the goal posts to: "well you don't really need those features anyways". They work on Gnome, Unity, e17, and probably XFCE and LXDE, so there's no (good) excuse for them not to work in KDE.

If my point was that KDE supports AMD GPUs poorly, then the question would be: do any of those effects work on Nvidia or Intel GPUs?

If they do, then it completely validates my point. If not, then the questions is: why on earth are they putting such a half-baked buggy feature into a so-called "stable" release of KDE, and then expecting people not to form a negative opinion of KDE?

I'll even take it one step further, I have Pentium IV, Core2 and Sandy Bridge machines available to me at work, and I may still some older Nvidia Quadro PCI cards laying around. Sometime next week, I'll compare OpenSUSE 11.4 on all of those various machines, and report back. My guess is that those machines will be somewhat better supported than the 2 AMD machines I've already tested.

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none of the issues you bring up here in the thread are known to the KWin developers - they are not reported in KDE's bugtracker. If you want to improve you should report the bugs you find to the developers with all required information so that it can get fixed in future releases.

But I think the bugtracker is the wrong place for it. What is described here are user support issues: something is going wrong badly and there are people on e.g. forum.kde.org who could help. KDE also offers #kde on freenode and there are also user support mailing lists. I am very sure that these issues can be resolved so that you can have a pleasant user experience.

Now to get on the claims that the effects do not work. I am sorry but that is wrong. I am typing here on a system using R300G driver, mostly I'm using R600G and there is no effect not supported on such drivers (some tweaks might be required, e.g. Invert Effect is only supported on R300G with OpenGL ES but not with OpenGL).

If brand new hardware fails that is nothing KDE can do about - we don't have the hardware. Concerning the mentioned crash of X: KDE could work around it (and does so by ensuring that you can only crash X once), but it is wrong. If an XClient is able to crash X it is a possible security vulnerability as in the worst case this could be used to execute arbitrary code as the user owning the X server process (most likely root). I hope we all agree that such crashes have to be fixed in the X server and not worked around in KDE as it affects more than just KDE.

I also just checked my bug mail directory and we did not have any report in 2011 about crashing X servers when using KWin. Whatever you experienced it is not reported in our bug tracker, so we do not even have a chance to do anything about it.

Given what you wrote about the experience with KWin on the brand new hardware I even doubt that it supports any OpenGL yet. KWin did not start with compositing enabled, which is a clear indication that something failed and trying to enforce it resulted in a crash of X. I am pretty sure that also Compiz does not work and e.g. Unity-2D was used as the fallback.

Concerning the live CD I want to mention that those are special beasts and might differ from the real experience. Especially we as KDE do not have any influence on how the distributions build the live CDs. I never tried the openSUSE 11.4 live CD, but I can say that it comes with Plasma 4.6.0 - our current release is 4.7.2. It might be that there is some issue with compositing on the live CD. It might be that it starts into failsafe mode where compositing is disabled. This would explain why none of the effects worked even after checking them. And trying to think as a distributor I can understand why they would go for security and disable compositing on an installation media.

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none of the issues you bring up here in the thread are known to the KWin developers - they are not reported in KDE's bugtracker. If you want to improve you should report the bugs you find to the developers with all required information so that it can get fixed in future releases.

I don't have a problem with that, I actively participate in several bug-trackers, primarily for projects that I'm interested in, either personally or professionally. I've never been very interested in KDE because I've never had very good experiences with it, but I'm all for contributing to FOSS with good bug reports.

But I think the bugtracker is the wrong place for it. What is described here are user support issues: something is going wrong badly and there are people on e.g. forum.kde.org who could help. KDE also offers #kde on freenode and there are also user support mailing lists. I am very sure that these issues can be resolved so that you can have a pleasant user experience.

That's where you're missing the point. I don't want to use KDE, because it's unstable and poorly supports AMD hardware in general. If for some crazy reason I actually chose to use KDE over Gnome, Unity, or any other DE that actually works properly... and therefore was interested in finding whatever magic combination of settings might make KDE usable, then the forum AND the bugtracker would both be appropriate. Given the choice of being a perpetual KDE alpha-bug-tester, or picking a DE project that has their act together, I'm going to choose one that has their act together.

Now to get on the claims that the effects do not work. I am sorry but that is wrong. I am typing here on a system using R300G driver, mostly I'm using R600G and there is no effect not supported on such drivers (some tweaks might be required, e.g. Invert Effect is only supported on R300G with OpenGL ES but not with OpenGL).

So, you're saying that either

a)I'm lying.(and others in the thread who have made similar claims are also lying). or
b)I'm not doing it right, or
c)I didn't take the time to find those magic settings to make it work right.

I'm sorry dude, but all 3 of those answers are wrong. I'm trying to figure out if you actually believe what you're saying, or if you are trying to perpetuate some bizarre agenda where you knowingly waste your entirely life writing/maintaining deliberately broken software, for god-know's-what reasons... The only 2 ideas that really explain your behaviour are either that you're bat-scheisse crazy, or that you've accepted money from somebody to screw up KDE on-purpose. TBH, I'm leaning towards the former...